Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Rockman Online Development Continues

Aside from the occasional storyline-based updates, it's been awfully quiet on the Rockman Online front. Seriously: our last bit of actual news dates all the way back to November 2010! With two major game cancellations under our belt, people are naturally beginning to worry about RMO's future. Fortunately there's no need to fret; Rockman Online is alive and well.

Rockman Unity's Ucchy-san has been running a series of reports focusing entirely on the game's development, chronicling his time spent with RMO developer Neowiz. The reports indicate a steady development, with today's post in particular briefly mentioning the game entering the final stages of production. Neowiz remain devoted to producing a high-quality product, all the while having some fun in the process (above).

No new information about the game itself was disclosed; however, Neowiz assures Rockman Unity that the game has been "powered-up" since its last appearance at G-Star 2010. According to the game's producer, Rockman Online has seen major improvements in terms of story depth and the inclusion ofa slew of new gameplay features... features that will be revealed at a later date.

And now, the ultimate question: is Rockman Online still exclusive to Korea? Yes. Rockman Unity reports the game continues to remain exclusive to regions throughout Asia -- a Japanese release, however, is being considered. No mention of an English release, I'm afraid. Still, if this is something you'd like to see in your region, I suggest making a requestdirectly to Capcom.

Good to see at least one game is coming along... even if most of us don't necessarily get to play it.

There are a number of strange, exclusive Mega Man titles most people have never heard of. There were actually a copy Dash titles in I think China, maybe Korea . . . I'm not sure. Anyway, this isn't really all that unheard of and while it does stink that it's likely not going to hit much of the rest of the world, well, at least somebody is going to get some Mega Man. Plus, we can still totally watch all that cool animation in the game regardless of whether we can understand it or not. :P

It all likely has to do with licensing and ensuring that some kind of stable infrastructure is in place before bringing this overseas. NeoWiz does have offices in the US, so I'd expect Rockman Online to get here eventually. After 1 year of the official launch in Korea at the very minimum.

And by infrastructure, if it's a free-to-play game like I think it is, they're going to need a way to advertise and handle our microtransactions before they even think about bringing it over.

If we're unfortunate enough that Nexon is the one publishing this in the US (which is a possibility, as they pretty much have a near monopoly on F2P MMOs here), it's likely that this will be the ONLY thing that they will work on before release here, and I say that as someone that has been following MapleStory for close to five years and watched how quickly Dragon Nest open beta went from game design brilliance to an absolute mismanagement disaster in just two weeks.

Fan translation? Private server?

Can you do that with an MMO?

Private servers have existed in MMOs for a while, particularly in Ragnarok and MapleStory. As for fan translations, I hear that the Chinese version of Dragon Nest has a fan translation patch, and the game barely came into existence about a year ago.

The region exclusivity is not surprising at all. The game is a licensed title, and usually those licenses also deal with the regions of distribution.

Ys Online (which sucked!) did that, and was limited to only certain European states. You could, of course, use a proxy to access the game if you did it right.

In this case, though, the game seems to be locked out through requiring the use of a Korean Social Security Number upon registration. It may be possible to spoof access when it hits other Asian countries, but probably not South Korea.

On the other hand...If someone from one of those regions gets a copy of the game, they should be able to share the files with someone who can set up a private server. It ultimately depends on how much of the information is on the server's end and how much is on the user's end.

It worked for WoW, Phantasy Star, and countless others, so there is some hope!